Global Metabolite Profiling: The Fast-Track for Functional Genomics

Organizers

Steven Gross, PhD

Weill Cornell Medical College
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Steven S. Gross is Professor of Pharmacology and Director of the Mass Spectrometry Core Facility. Gross's expertise is in pharmacology, and cell and structural biology, particularly in relation to the role of nitric oxide (NO) as a signaling molecule. In the late 1980s, Gross and colleagues made the initial identification of L-arginine as the precursor of NO in blood vessels. They were also first to establish that NOS inhibition elevates blood pressure in animals, demonstrating that NO plays a physiological role in controlling blood pressure and vascular tone. Since then, research efforts have predominantly focused on elucidating the enzymes and mechanisms that regulate NO synthesis in cells. Gross has authored or coauthored more than 90 research publications and 40 book chapters, review articles and books in the area of NO biology. He is an active member of NIH Study Sections and is a founder and Board Director of the Nitric Oxide Society, a group that organizes the major annual international meetings on the subject of NO and publishes a peer-reviewed scientific journal with novel reports on NO biology and chemistry. Gross received his PhD in Biomedical Science from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

Jennifer Henry, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences
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Speakers

Oliver Fiehn, PhD

University of California, Davis
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Oliver Fiehn is a Professor at the University of California, Davis in the Genome Center. After obtaining his PhD from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany in Analytical Toxicology, he joined the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in 1998 to contribute to the field of metabolomics. He accepted an offer to join UC Davis in 2004 and has since focused on metabolomics in human diseases, analytical techniques, and databases. He has published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals and is a member of the board of the directors of the Metabolomics Society, and member of the editorial boards of several journals, among them the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Fiehn's main research field is the mass spectrometry and its use for metabolite analysis, in conjunction with bioinformatics approaches to utilize metabolic data for plant and animal research.

F. Peter Guengerich, PhD

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
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F. Peter Guengerich is a Professor of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He received his BS from the University of Illinois in 1970 and then did his graduate work at Vanderbilt University, receiving his PhD in Biochemistry in 1973. After two years as a research fellow at the University of Michigan, he was hired as Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt in 1975 and has been on faculty since then, and he attained the rank of Professor in 1983. Guengerich has been Director of the Center in Molecular Toxicology, an interdepartmental program at Vanderbilt, since 1981. In 2010 he assumed the position of Interim Chair of the Department of Biochemistry.

His own research laboratory deals with the chemical and biological mechanisms by which drugs and cancer-causing chemicals are processed and the relevance to drug development, toxicity, and disease. A major area of interest is the enzymology of cytochrome P450 enzymes, which are the major catalysts involved in the metabolism of drugs. He is an author or co-author of 603 original research articles and 176 invited reviews. He is an associate editor of The Journal of Biological Chemistry and Chemical Research in Toxicology.

Alan Saghatelian, PhD

Harvard University
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Alan Saghatelian grew up in southern California and attended UCLA as an undergrad where he graduated with a degree in chemistry. He got his first taste of research working with Professor Craig Merlic in the area of organometallic chemistry and synthetic chemistry. For graduate school, Saghatelian attended The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla where he moved into biochemical problems such as the molecular mechanisms that spawned life and allosteric regulation of enzymes through protein engineering. It was at TSRI that Saghatelian became more interested in biomedical research and he remained at TSRI for a postdoc with Professor Benjamin Cravatt where he developed (with Gary Siuzdak's help) methods for global metabolite profiling of lipids to identify novel mammalian lipids and substrates for enzymes. In 2006, Saghatelian started in the chemistry department at Harvard where he has continued to extend the utility of these methods to biology. He is currently an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Gary Siuzdak, PhD

The Scripps Research Institute, California
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Gary Siuzdak is Director of the Scripps Center for Metabolomics and Professor of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He is also Faculty Guest at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and served as Vice President of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. His research includes developing novel approaches to unbiased metabolomics, the development of nanostructure-based platforms for mass spectrometry imaging, novel approaches to virus characterization and inhibition, and mass-based inhibitor-enzyme screening. He has over 170 peer-reviewed publications and two books, the latest being The Expanding Role of Mass Spectrometry in Biotechnology, 2nd Edition 2006.

Nicola Zamboni, PhD

Institute of Molecular Systems Biology, ETH Zurich
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Nicola Zamboni is a principal investigator at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology of ETH Zurich since 2005. He graduated in group of Jay Bailey at the Institute of Biotechnology of ETH Zurich, where he also received his PhD in 2003 in the field of Metabolic Engineering. In 2004, he moved to Stanford University to devise metabolomics-derived approaches for unraveling causes of intracellular metabolic changes. His research in this area continues currently at ETH Zurich, where his work builds on metabolomics, 13C flux analysis, and computational biology.

Research in his group ultimately aims at identifying interaction networks involving metabolism in complex systems, spanning from microorganisms in natural environments to pathogens and higher cells.

Megan Stephan

Megan Stephan studied transporters and ion channels at Yale University for nearly two decades before giving up the pipettor for the pen. She specializes in covering research at the interface between biology, chemistry and physics. Her work has appeared in The Scientist and Yale Medicine. Stephan holds a PhD in biology from Boston University.

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